Company claims #AlexFromTarget was a marketing ploy but Alex denies it

Was the #AlexFromTarget hoopla just a clever marketing ploy? That’s what one company is claiming— but those involved, including Alex from Target himself, aka Alex Laboeuf— say the marketing company taking credit had nothing to do with the huge social media trend.

“Yesterday, we had fun on Twitter with the hashtag #AlexFromTarget which ended up to be one of the most amazing social media experiments ever,” wrote Dil-Domine Jacobe Leonares. “We wanted to see how powerful the fangirl demographic was by taking a unknown good-looking kid and Target employee from Texas to overnight viral Internet sensation.”

Leonares claims his company then added “fuel to the fire by tweeting about it to our bigger YouTube influencers” and later posted parody images to keep the trend going.

But Laboeuf, who now has 588,000 Twitter followers, spoke out against Leonares.

Apparently there is a company trying to take credit for how the pic taken of me went viral.

In Leonares' LinkedIn post, he claimed the photo circulated because one of the company’s “fangirls” named Abbie posted it first. He included her Twitter handle in his letter, but the user linked to that account also denied knowing anything about the company.

The user wrote she just posted a photo she found on Tumblr adding, “i dont work for breakr…i dont even know what it is.”

Target has not made mention of the #AlexFromTarget trend since Monday when the company tweeted, “We heart Alex, too! #alexfromtarget”

Do you think #AlexFromTarget was a creative marketing tactic or a real social media trend? Let us know in the comments section or join the conversation on the FOX411 Facebook page.